One of the problems that occurs with bowling balls is that when the ball is released it does not immediately roll along the lane but slips or spins along the lane. This spin of the ball along the lane causes the ball to receive excessive wear on the portion of the ball that slips along the lane. This repeated slipping causes the ball to lose its sphericity. Typically, an elongated groove or track is worn in the surface of the ball as the ball is repeatedly released with the same spin. This is referred to as the ball becoming out-of-round. Simply resurfacing of the ball can smoothen the region around the groove or track but the basic out-of-roundness of the ball remains since the recess in the surface of the ball produced by the groove or mack remains in the ball unless the entire diameter of the ball is reduced to the diameter of the ball at the low spot. Typically, a ball may be out-of-round and have a low spot that is in excess of ten thousandths of an inch from the normal perfect spherical shape of the ball. Two approaches are used to minimized the effect of the track worn in the ball. One approach is to simply sand or smoothen the surface so that the edges of the groove or track are blended into the surface of the ball however, this approach does not bring the ball back to its original spherical shape. The other approach is to recut the ball to a smaller diameter that has the shape of a perfect sphere.
The concept of bowling-ball resurfacing machines for smoothing the surfaces of the ball as well as recutting the surface of the ball are old in the art. However, one of the difficulties with prior art machines and particularly those that recut the ball is that not only are the machines costly, the machines oftentimes require precise alignment of both the ball and the cutting tool in order to bring an out-of-round ball back into round.
The present invention provides an improvement to ball-resurfacing machines in which no alignment or adjustment of the forces on the ball is necessary to allow the resurfacing operation to be completed by an unskilled operator in a few minutes with the ball restored to its original perfect spherical shape through the resurfacing action of the present invention.